design + construction blog

Finishes Take Forever

When I was a young girl my grandmother Alice Bell gave me a book entitled The Children’s Book of Virtues written by William J. Bennett. With this book, she introduced me to her Catholic faith and the Seven Heavenly Virtues: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and compassion – tenets that she religiously lived by. The virtue that remains most vivid in my memory is that of patience, probably because it is the one I most need to work on, and one in which The Bells are notoriously lacking (it’s genetic).

I don’t believe there is anything more trying of your patience (except for, perhaps, waiting to meet your unborn child) than the finishes at the end of a project. Each day going to the jobsite, anxious and excited, to discover what almost indiscernible progress had been made from the day before.

And then, oddly, all of a sudden it’s done.

I last posted at the end of October and now it is mid-December. In that excruciatingly long month-and-a-half, the following has happened:

Wood floors – finished installing.

Water pipe in master bathroom burst and flooded part of aforementioned wood floors – currently buckled but slowly laying back down – mistake covered by plumbers insurance.